Advertisements placed by individuals seeking to meet other individuals are often referred to as personal ads, or "personals". Various types of publications print personals, including newspapers and magazines. The method by which a personal ad is placed and/or responded to can vary. For example, a telephone system may be employed to place ads which are then printed in a newspaper or magazine. Responses to personals may be telephone responses in the form of recorded voice messages which are stored for retrieval.
Some publications (referred to herein as the "client") enlist the services of another organization (referred to herein as the "vendor"), such as Tele-Publishing, Inc., the Assignee of the subject invention, for the purpose of collecting and processing personal ads and providing the text of the ads in a convenient form for publication. The vendor operates a plurality of computers, referred to as call centers, to which telephone access is provided. A call center operator, or ad taker, answers telephone calls from individuals seeking to place ads (referred to herein as "advertisers") and enters the text of the personal ads onto the computer, along with other information, such as information identifying the advertiser.
In one system in which responses to personal ads are recorded voice messages, the vendor maintains a plurality of computers (referred to herein as ad response machines) on which the responses are recorded on a voice recording media. The ad response machines are located remotely relative to the vendor and more locally with respect to the clients in order to reduce the cost of placing telephone call responses. The ad taker provides the advertiser with a box, including a box number and a security code, with which telephone access to the responses is achieved. More particularly, the box number identifies a portion of the voice recording media on which responses to the advertiser's personal ad are stored and the security code ensures that the party accessing such responses is authorized to do so.
Conventionally, a predetermined number of boxes are initially allotted for ads placed for publication by each client and, when the number of available boxes falls below a predetermined level, vendor personnel call the ad response machine servicing the client to download additional box numbers and security codes via a modem. The new box numbers and security codes are then entered onto a computer for future use. However, this technique disadvantageously requires frequent monitoring of the number of boxes available for each client and is susceptible to errors which may occur in transcribing the box numbers and security codes onto the computer.
The vendor accumulates a number of personal ads and provides the text of the ads to the client in a convenient form, such as on a computer diskette or a hard copy. Some clients request the "raw text" of the accumulated personals, with little or no processing by the vendor. Other clients have the vendor process the text of the ads and provide the ads in a format and order ready to print (i.e., "camera ready"). Such processing generally includes determining the number of ads to provide for printing in the space allocated by the client and the optimum order in which to print of the ads on the basis of which ads are most likely to elicit responses. Ordering ads in this manner is advantageous since revenue is based on the number and duration of responses placed with "900" calls.
In sorting and ordering personal ads based on their likelihood of response, typically a vendor account executive relies on experience as to which types of ads (i.e., categories of ads and parameters applicable to the ads) historically obtain the most responses when published by the particular client. However, this task is significant in view of the number of clients serviced by the vendor, the frequency with which ads are delivered to the client, the number of different ad categories and possible ad parameters and the frequency with which changing demographics and other factors cause changes in the success of certain types of ads. The account executive may additionally request from the ad response machine "minutes reports" which are printed reports listing the number of minutes that each box is accessed and use such reports in determining which ad types have the greatest likelihood of response. However, the usefulness of such minutes reports in optimizing the order of presentation of ads varies based on the time lapse between issuance of such reports and production of the personal ad text and, further, by the fact that the number of minutes that a box is accessed is not always an accurate indication of the number of responses received.